The Way of Tat

Yesterday was a Special Day at Les Briconautes. For those of you unversed in the ways of French DIY, Les Briconautes is a shop where one can buy the sorts of things you might buy in B&Q, along with a small selection of white goods. Except that, whereas in B&Q you can get pretty much anything you might need for home plumbing/electrical/building/decorating jobs for a reasonable price, in Les Briconautes you can rarely find anything you want, and what you do find is usually too expensive for you to be able to bring yourself to actually purchase it – the decision invariably being followed by the statement “I’ll get it from Screwfix next time I go to England”.

But yesterday was a 20%-Off-Everything Day, for special customers such as Simon, who received his voucher through the post (only a few weeks after receiving a 10% discount voucher from them for his birthday – how sweet!). How he has come to achieve the status of Special Customer god only knows. We visit fairly frequently, but we purchase very rarely. We did however buy our new wood stove from Les Briconautes a couple of months ago, when we saw it in a junk mail leaflet at a tres-moins-cher promotion price. (The model we actually ended up with wasn’t exactly the model in the leaflet we thought we were getting, but hey ho, it does the trick, and is now somewhat messily installed in our living room, chucking out the chilblain-banishing kilowatts, and attracting a vast array of snoozing animals like some cast-iron cat-and-dog magnet.)

Perhaps he is a special customer merely by dint of being a customer at all. Whenever we visit to search for such exciting items as elusive 12mm bolts, or non-existent things-to-fix-on-the-wall-in-the-shower-for-holding-shampoo-bottles-so-they-don’t-keep-falling-annoyingly-off-the-tap-block-on-to-your-toes-while-your-eyes-are-shut-and-soapy, we seem to be the only customers in the shop – apart, that is, from the one other customer who always gets to the check-out just ahead of us and then takes AGES, searching in endless pockets for his cheque-book, so he can write a cheque for some tiny item that costs a few centimes but of course DOESN’T HAVE A BAR CODE, thus necessitating the cashier-away-from-the-check-out scenario for half an hour, while she searches for a price label on similar pointless items in the nether realms of the empty establishment.

But despite our repeatedly fruitless Briconautes experiences, we dutifully toddled off yesterday to visit it once again, Simon clutching his 20% discount voucher optimistically in his clammy fist, while I berated him for not parking closer to the entrance on such a bone-achingly cold day.

And we tried. Really we did. We wandered the tinsel-festooned aisles like hopeful ghosts in some Christmassy DIY Marie Celeste, searching for something – anything – that we could purchase at what might just about approach a reasonable price given the decent-sized discount-off-the-ridiculous. We briefly considered a new freezer (to house the overabundance of home-grown fruit and veg that we anticipate wallowing in next summer), but there was only one that remotely suited our requirements, and it was a bit small, and not frost-free, and well….. we couldn’t possibly buy such an expensive item with such a ludicrous degree of spontaneity, when there are all those Which Best-Buy reviews to research first. We looked for a log basket – an attractive one to replace the garish big red plastic bucket that currently adorns our homely hearth in a dangerously-close-to-melting fashion, but, somewhat inexplicably in a shop full of wood-burning stoves and sacks of logs, there was not one to be seen. Simon searched in vain for the lusted-after 12mm bolts, and found only 6,8,10 and 14mm versions with the same irritating space where the 12mm bolts should be. I briefly considered bathroom vanity units (so tacky, and yet so expensive) and self-assembly shelving units with all the strength of a tower of straws (who actually buys this stuff?). We toyed with the idea of a cat-flap (thinking to avoid our recurrent cats-opening-the-door-and-letting-the-dogs-out-to-feast-on-chicken-poo episodes), but decided against it (on the basis of cats-bringing-gross-not-quite-dead-things-into-the-house possibilities). I thought about a pine storage box for the keeping therein of bed linen, but concluded that our existing practice of piling all our sheets and quilt covers in the second-hand cot wedged next to our bed (brought back from Simon’s parents’ loft in Dover to provide sleeping accommodation for our grand-daughter during the family visit back in September) is a perfectly functional arrangement (with the added advantage that I can hang my discarded clothes over the cot sides as I retire to bed of a lazy night-time).

So, after three quarters of an hour pacing the echoing alleys and losing each other behind racks piled high with uselessness, and mindful of the fact that our big puppies would be pacing our living room with bursting bladders while we still had the food-shopping to do, we gave up. We squandered our prized voucher on a bottle of something nasty for cleaning black stuff off the wood-stove window, and a metal ring for attaching to the barn wall, (so we have somewhere to hook the rampant puppies for a few moments when they have got themselves too wet and muddy to be allowed back into the house), and headed across the road to hastily complete our afternoon’s shopping adventure in the small-and-gloriously-dull Carrefour supermarket.

And on our homeward journey, our reusable shopping bags full of basic essentials and nothing more, I was struck by the contrast with my recent shopping experiences in England, where my trips to Sainsburys and my daily assignations with my daughter in the Wonderful Shiny Glittery World of the Westfield Centre presented me with a Consumer Heaven of Must-Have purchasing temptations. And I was thankful that we live in the middle of Nowhere, where the few shops within easy travelling distance of home stock Nothing-of-Any-Interest, and where living the Simple Life is as easy as falling off a home-grown log.